I'm close to 60, now around 50 I noticed things were going south and I wasn't to happy about it. So I did some research and made lifestyle changes - nothing startling, ate well and started an exercise program. Now I feel like I'm 40 again.
I have some friends who I've known since high school, now some have health issues and its how they respond seems to make a difference. Some just take the pills the doctor gives them and accept the ageing process and complain about things. Others, like myself, fight tooth and nail to do whatever they can. Of course you can only fight so much - the genetic hand you're dealt, but, I believe your attitude to ageing is really a factor - if you accept it, or fight it. Which sort of aligns with the personality traits they observed. You're only as old as you feel as the saying goes.
I know one lady for example who has had two cancers and was forced to use a walker for a while but is going again, whereas her husband was showing me all the pills he takes - due to being overweight and eating poorly. He has accepted his fate, she has fought against it.
If you’re interested, you should check out ‘Ortho Bionomy - A path to self care’ by Luann Overmyer. She touches a lot on what you were just saying.
Often, people expect to do whatever they want and then go to doctors to ‘fix’ them. It’s good for doctors, but not so great for you.
I just started getting into some of the self-care routines she lists in her book after breaking my foot and having multiple doctors recommend surgery to ‘fix’ things. Instead of going down that route, I asked an Ortho-bionomist I know personally to help me. In a single session, most of the swelling and limp in my foot ‘disappeared’. After sticking to the very simple routines he suggested and that I read in the book(none involving pills or icing it), my foot healed more in a week than it did in the 2 months I sat around taking Tylenol and just ‘waiting’ for someone to fix me.
> Often, people expect to do whatever they want and then go to doctors to ‘fix’ them. It’s good for doctors, but not so great for you.
Hackernews doesn't realize they are the 0.000001% of patients we see. I'd love for all my patients to make the lifestyle, diet and habit changes I recommend in addition to the medications I prescribe. The reality is that users here do not recognize the privilege they have in terms of money, agency and knowledge. The vast majority of people I see are barely scraping by and have very little time/effort/privilege to make the changes I would like them to undergo.
Doctors can't really expect all or even most of their patients to take full responsibility for the hard work of actually fixing something. They'll recommend the thing that will work a little bit for everyone. They can't know that you're one of the ones who will put in the extra effort.
At least that's the feeling I got from my GP when he diagnosed me with high BP about a decade ago. He prescribed some pills, I asked about lifestyle changes and what happens when your body adjusts to the pills, can you just stop taking them or is there a tolerance, etc.
He said something like "some people exercise, and maybe it helps, but just take the pills."
I was willing to do whatever I had to do, because I saw high BP as a dysfunction, and wanted to fix whatever the root cause was. I don't want to be an unhealthy person taking pills to help me live a longer unhealthy life, I wanted to be healthy.
Icing, and cold therapy in general, has now been pretty well debunked. People like it because it feels good but if anything it probably inhibits healing for most musculoskeletal injuries. The book "Good to Go" by Christie Aschwanden contains an accessible summary of the current research.
This phenomena, combined with the alternative medicine woo movement, makes me feel like we are hopelessly between a rock and a hard place with medicine.
I say "US medical treatment often doesn't explore valid alternative remedies and focuses of treating preventable conditions after they've developed into serious problems."
They say "Yes, rub some sage oil to kill the nanobots"
scream
My favourite example as a trans woman is that the orchiectomy could be apparently replaced by a 2 cent ethanol injection.
Saudi Arabians are the only ones willing to try it and publish the results.
My grandfather was a nuclear scientist who worked on the Manhattan project. He ate right and exercised daily. He even maintained the community parks as a volunteer fixing things like tennis courts and fences.
He got Alzheimer’s. It dragged out for over a decade killing him slowly and hurting everyone who knew him.
My father decided he’d rather have a shorter but more quality driven life after that experience. He’s overweight, has a great outlook on his life, and is a joy to be around.
Hi, psychologist here. Cognitive decline is not my specialty but I’ve taken doctoral level courses in it.
The problem with the “shorter higher quality life” position is that diet, exercise and health affect EVERYTHING. Exercise and diet are majorly implicated in both physical health decline and onset of dementia and Alzheimer’s. In fact, maintaining a healthy and active lifestyle is often found to be the number one protective factor against cognitive decline.
Unfortunately there’s no health strategy that reliably produces a shorter higher quality life. There’s only increasing health span through lifestyle.
Note: there are medical choices that increase lifespan but not health - medication and surgery that prolong unhealth. But that’s a whole different game than healthy lifestyle.
My mother's dad died of stomach cancer, my mothers mom had a brain tumor and died of organ failure, my mother was an alcoholic and died of liver failure, my father was an alcoholic and died from massive organ trauma (he made a series of bad decisions in rapid succession), my father's dad had multiple heart attacks and died of complications from MDS, my father's mother is still alive. There's a history of mental illness, cancer, diabetes, and overall poor health on both sides of my family....
That said, I'm taking as good care of myself as I can without going to the extreme. I don't want to deny my one short, brief life the pleasures that are here to be experienced but I also don't want to artificially shorten my (already stacked against) life.
I have decided however that I won't be dying in pain in some hospital if I can at all help it. I've watched it happen. I'll either live somewhere that assisted is allowed, or I'll FEED MYSELF TO SHARKS...something, anything, other than the slow waste of a hospital.
Yeah, I was replying to the 'superager' submission and my observations in connection. People can do whatever they want, particularly when you hit 60 :-).
These two things are not in opposition. I eat whatever and whenever I want... because I also enjoy large amounts of physical activity that burn it all off.
I find it weird to say that not taking care of yorself is accepting the ageing process. I like to think that doing everything you can is the 'normal' behavior.
Like I said, nothing startling. I do studio pilates a couple of times a week, if you have aches and pains I really recommend this - I don't have back pain anymore because of this. I walk everywhere now, I used to drive everywhere, I moved inner city near public transport. It seems very personal though, I know some people that run a lot, not for me, others do gym work or golf. It really depends on what bits are hurting I feel. I do think we all need some sort of strength training, and the research seems to back that up, and Pilates is superb for that. I'd been very sedentary for a number of years, and happened to go to someone that had done a lot of rehab work, she was great. I tried a few people though, so just find one that works for you.
Diet is mainly Mediterranean now - beans, lentils, veggies, fish etc. occasional meat, but not much.
Isn't it surprising that just eating real food (clean diet), not smoking or drinking and walking a little everyday can cut all cause mortality like in half, leaving you younger, healthier and more mentally engaged. Those changes in lifestyle for some is hard work, not everyone is cut out for it. Shame they don't think it's worth saving themselves and prefer the taste of pills to healthy food. I sort of figure it's Natural Selection at play, all these folks who choose to poison themselves and embrace chronic illness as something that is inevitable will eventually fall out of the Gene pool, unfortunately the destruction they cause during and on the way out costs all of us an enormous amount of resources.
> I sort of figure it's Natural Selection at play, all these folks who choose to poison themselves and embrace chronic illness as something that is inevitable will eventually fall out of the Gene pool, unfortunately the destruction they cause during and on the way out costs all of us an enormous amount of resources.
That’s not how natural selection works. Men over the age of 50 father less than %1 of babies, and it’s lower than that for women. So if a tendency to embrace chronic pathological behaviors is genetic, the offspring will be born long before the behavior catches up with them. Things get a little more complicated because of the inter generational support networks. The older generation does support their offspring, but at eventually will need support, and take resources from the breeding cohort. Which is the only cohort natural selection cares about.
Resisting brain shrinkage: reminds me of a somewhat different but related report I heard in the past of a group of nuns who seemed to age very well such that their cognitive functions remained seemingly strong into old age. They donated their brains to research, and upon study significant shrinkage was found similar to some degree of Alzheimer's. I think the conclusion was that because they kept themselves so active and busy, whatever synaptic connections were necessary for their daily functioning were kept strong, alongside important life memories. Another strong case for how "retirement" is harmful.
Generally, the rate at which memory synapses weakens is similar across the general population (stability of a memory synapse), so for super-agers it is probably genetic.
I may not have a super-ager brain, but as a lifelong learner and brain-health lover I've placed all my significant memories into a spaced-repetition program I use for everything, and thus am able to recall at will all sorts of important memories in life. I'm keeping my important synapses strong.
There's another category besides super-agers: people with hyperthymesia: "a condition that leads people to be able to remember an abnormally large number of their life experiences in vivid detail. It is extraordinarily rare, with only about 60 people in the world having been diagnosed with the condition as of 2021." There's a documentary about these people. You ask them: what important event happened in your life on January 7th, 1980, and they can answer it accurately.
London taxi driver has enlarged hippocampus so it isn't impossible to make changes that's big enough to have noticeable impact on your brain structure.
I haven't seen anything that indicates that is also true for episodic memory though.
It's usually something that brings up very positive emotions, like childhood memories, wedding/honeymoon pictures, me at various stages of life, important transition periods, people I want to remember well, etc.
For the "negative", I've mostly resorted to journaling in ways that help me self-discover and resolve the past, such as SelfAuthoring.com exercises that I continually write and re-write from time to time (I bought and copied the exercises to my local drive).
Spaced repetition program - I think I have had one by accident, organizing and tagging all the photos I've taken since 1997. If I took a picture of it, I can likely tell you all about the events surrounding it.
My wife tells me things we did, and there aren't photos of those occasions, so I know I'm not remembering everything.
The photo albums our parents and grandparents had were spaced repetition.
That's awesome. Good thoughts. The attention and strength of emotions really do affect the strength of memory synapses, and you got it so right in that the most common form of spaced repetition is something we all experience: recalling and thinking about memories, including re-opening photo albums.
Not advertising it, but I've found it's the best for my needs despite the effort it takes to stick to it.
I would liken it to an average computer user making the effort to learn and stick to Emacs because they really believe it will pay off in the long term. And SuperMemo sure has paid off for me.
No, you can't use the phrase "leads to this". It misinforms the reader because that's not exactly what the researchers wrote. We need to be super pedantic about this because they found correlations of personality traits but did not make the leap to say optimism, etc were the causes. For your linked article:
>"The findings suggest that superagers have unique personality profiles," Rogalski said, noting that they stood out for their optimism, resilience, and perseverance – as well as active and engaged lifestyles, marked by pursuits like travel, reading, and positive social relationships.
E.g. the same researcher also wrote about rare Von Economo neurons (VENs)[1] that exist in higher quantities in the elderly that don't have early dementia and Alzheimers. They don't know if those rare VENs are present at birth. This means it could be an candidate confounding variable that causes both the optimism/resilience and protection from dementia.
There needn't even be a confounding variable, the direction of causation may simply be reversed: not personality traits -> superager, but superager -> personality traits.
Sounds quite plausible to me that having a good memory at old age leads to a more active and engaged lifestyle leading to happy people that appear less neurotic and more extrovert.
These kinds of studies should always come with a trigger warning: "Be aware if you are emotionally distressed when your belief in the Just-World-Fallacy is threatened."
Joking aside, having grown up relatively poor and feeling compelled to put work success above everything else to ensure economic stability for my kids these things really do negatively shape my expectations for the second half my life. Not sure what to do about that.
* Sleep as close to eight hours a night as you can
* Cook healthy food
* Maintain a low waist circumference and maintain muscle mass
* Have some combo of low intensity cardio (walking etc) and higher intensity stuff. A 7 min strength training circuit is good here
The basics are surprisingly hard, the majority of north american adults flunk all of these. From your description you may be missing at least the majority.
That’s ok, you have a clear priority in your life. The point is, examine that list and your own life/work schedule, and see if one of those can be improved within your existing framework.
Usually this is possible for one of them and they actually work together. Improving any of these gives your body its best shot at maintaining itself over the long haul despite work stress.
You have adapted your emotional processing towards the belief that work/financial success supersedes all else. This belief, and the set of beliefs underneath it, are reasonable, though incomplete. Being completely adapted to an incomplete set of beliefs is what leads to emotional/existential distress. Just add to your belief set and adapt yourself to a more complete set of beliefs.
Giving your all for the next generation is inspiring. Minimum economic stability is so important, as is being healthy and able to enjoy life with others. Don't really know what to say, except I hope that over time you're able to stick to the known foundations of body and mental health (that I know of): good sleep, aerobic exercise, healthy diet, fulfilling relationships.
The sister of my grandmother is like this. Travelled the world, stuck in San Francisco at some time, now 97 years old. She is connected via tablet, computer, smartphone, and we discuss world politics every week. She frequently changes her point of view based on new information, which is incredible to me. She is able to reflect, question herself and others and it is entirely beyond me how her brain can work like this with her age.
It's certainly possible for elderly people to maintain a high level of fitness through intense training. But some of them are heavily geared. I see guys at the gym or at endurance races where physique and performance are obviously not natural. And I'm not judging them, maybe the tradeoffs are worthwhile?
My grandfather apparently is such a person. Currently 94 and as lucid as he was 25 years ago and with an amazing memory at that, which he shows off by reciting poetry he learned in the course of the last 85 years or so.
Even if I inherited this trait and lived that long, I doubt I would be able to repeat this - he's been very active throughout his whole life and neither drinks nor smokes.
The article linked to another one with more detail:
> Superagers are more likely to be extroverts and less likely to be neurotic than others, and it looks like their active lifestyles aren't necessarily healthy in other ways. In at least one study, 71 percent of superagers smoked, while 83 percent drank alcohol regularly.
How were the individuals' baselines assessed? Some people have exceptionally good memories. It would not be suprising if these traits often persisted into old age in some of such individuals. For example a person with a savant pmemory at 25 might have the memory of an average 25 year when at 85. That would not suprise me. That said memory is not all that it is cracked up to be. When I was young I had an exceptional memory for facts. It hasn't helped me too much in adult life due to other psychosocial deficits and bad luck and evironment. There are different forms of memory. My emotional and autobiographic memory is sometimes so bad it is weird. Like many life events don't leave too strong an impression.
I don't think there can be a baseline. They would have had to scan a couple of hundred people 60 years ago to establish it.
Plus, the results are on a very small group. It's difficult for me to imagine that fMRI can reliably show differences. And it's also noticeable that they couch the effect in very vague terms: "similar pattern", "more youthful". That's a lot of freedom to interpret a few so much data.
That they've found a bio-marker sounds implausible to me: all they've found is a correlation with a memory task that can't be measured without applying that task.
Yes, I know a person who is an adept computer scientist and well regarded author, yet they are quite frustrated that they have such a hard time remembering people by their voice and face that only people they are constantly close with are familiar.
I also find that remembering peoples names take some time and effort.
On the other hand i am quite good at relating bits of information, which is useful for problem solving, e.g. where was something similar seen before.
This relation ability also works for words, such as your use of "adept". That relates to Battle Chess and then another old game called "Archon II: Adept", which is a bit like chess.
Granted, it's not always useful things that come up this way.
I can remember technical details from decades ago but often forget that I've met people socially just a couple of years ago.
Me and my partner just had a discussion this morning where she claimed I had met one of her friends, and her friends long term partner, in a bar. We apparently spent he whole evening together chatting. I remember nothing of this evening (and I wasn't drinking).
I've had some short term memory issues (I'm 51) that seem to, more than not, be attributed to working from home during COVID. As we're coming out of it, I see it gradually diminishing with the hopes of doing new things, getting out of the house, and doing 'a little more now rather than waiting for an eventuality that might never happen.'
I think it's a combination of a lack of stimuli, anxiety with work (I'm far from alone in our local employment where folks are underutilized and 'waiting to proceed', and a rut between the bed, the couch and the home office. I was (and am) getting exercise, but there needs to be more than that to continue to be mentally happy.
I think some of it was a psychological over-attribution to normal forgetfulness...people forget things...older people can proportionally forget more things...it's not [necessarily] early onset dementia, not during a pandemic.
Quite possibly. There were some contributing factors (massive change in senior leadership, followed by an immediate re-org that stretched out over months where a majority of staff didn't know their roles) that make it hard to put my thumb on any one contributing factor.
But a small environment, with no long-term goals + the sheer terror of a pandemic and unstable government fed by the media machine...isn't healthy.
Readit News
I have some friends who I've known since high school, now some have health issues and its how they respond seems to make a difference. Some just take the pills the doctor gives them and accept the ageing process and complain about things. Others, like myself, fight tooth and nail to do whatever they can. Of course you can only fight so much - the genetic hand you're dealt, but, I believe your attitude to ageing is really a factor - if you accept it, or fight it. Which sort of aligns with the personality traits they observed. You're only as old as you feel as the saying goes.
I know one lady for example who has had two cancers and was forced to use a walker for a while but is going again, whereas her husband was showing me all the pills he takes - due to being overweight and eating poorly. He has accepted his fate, she has fought against it.
Often, people expect to do whatever they want and then go to doctors to ‘fix’ them. It’s good for doctors, but not so great for you.
I just started getting into some of the self-care routines she lists in her book after breaking my foot and having multiple doctors recommend surgery to ‘fix’ things. Instead of going down that route, I asked an Ortho-bionomist I know personally to help me. In a single session, most of the swelling and limp in my foot ‘disappeared’. After sticking to the very simple routines he suggested and that I read in the book(none involving pills or icing it), my foot healed more in a week than it did in the 2 months I sat around taking Tylenol and just ‘waiting’ for someone to fix me.
Hackernews doesn't realize they are the 0.000001% of patients we see. I'd love for all my patients to make the lifestyle, diet and habit changes I recommend in addition to the medications I prescribe. The reality is that users here do not recognize the privilege they have in terms of money, agency and knowledge. The vast majority of people I see are barely scraping by and have very little time/effort/privilege to make the changes I would like them to undergo.
At least that's the feeling I got from my GP when he diagnosed me with high BP about a decade ago. He prescribed some pills, I asked about lifestyle changes and what happens when your body adjusts to the pills, can you just stop taking them or is there a tolerance, etc.
He said something like "some people exercise, and maybe it helps, but just take the pills."
I was willing to do whatever I had to do, because I saw high BP as a dysfunction, and wanted to fix whatever the root cause was. I don't want to be an unhealthy person taking pills to help me live a longer unhealthy life, I wanted to be healthy.
https://www.goodtogobook.com/
I say "US medical treatment often doesn't explore valid alternative remedies and focuses of treating preventable conditions after they've developed into serious problems."
They say "Yes, rub some sage oil to kill the nanobots"
scream
My favourite example as a trans woman is that the orchiectomy could be apparently replaced by a 2 cent ethanol injection.
Saudi Arabians are the only ones willing to try it and publish the results.
Get into pubmed commons, see for yourself.
Deleted Comment
What does that feel like? How could you tell?
Deleted Comment
He got Alzheimer’s. It dragged out for over a decade killing him slowly and hurting everyone who knew him.
My father decided he’d rather have a shorter but more quality driven life after that experience. He’s overweight, has a great outlook on his life, and is a joy to be around.
Not everyone wants longevity.
The problem with the “shorter higher quality life” position is that diet, exercise and health affect EVERYTHING. Exercise and diet are majorly implicated in both physical health decline and onset of dementia and Alzheimer’s. In fact, maintaining a healthy and active lifestyle is often found to be the number one protective factor against cognitive decline.
Unfortunately there’s no health strategy that reliably produces a shorter higher quality life. There’s only increasing health span through lifestyle.
Note: there are medical choices that increase lifespan but not health - medication and surgery that prolong unhealth. But that’s a whole different game than healthy lifestyle.
That said, I'm taking as good care of myself as I can without going to the extreme. I don't want to deny my one short, brief life the pleasures that are here to be experienced but I also don't want to artificially shorten my (already stacked against) life.
I have decided however that I won't be dying in pain in some hospital if I can at all help it. I've watched it happen. I'll either live somewhere that assisted is allowed, or I'll FEED MYSELF TO SHARKS...something, anything, other than the slow waste of a hospital.
I can't pull all nighters anymore. My body literally starts shutting down around 2:00 a.m.
My poop is less firm. I have to wipe a lot more.
Muscles take more time to stop being sore.
Other than that that's about it so far.
Diet is mainly Mediterranean now - beans, lentils, veggies, fish etc. occasional meat, but not much.
That’s not how natural selection works. Men over the age of 50 father less than %1 of babies, and it’s lower than that for women. So if a tendency to embrace chronic pathological behaviors is genetic, the offspring will be born long before the behavior catches up with them. Things get a little more complicated because of the inter generational support networks. The older generation does support their offspring, but at eventually will need support, and take resources from the breeding cohort. Which is the only cohort natural selection cares about.
Generally, the rate at which memory synapses weakens is similar across the general population (stability of a memory synapse), so for super-agers it is probably genetic.
I may not have a super-ager brain, but as a lifelong learner and brain-health lover I've placed all my significant memories into a spaced-repetition program I use for everything, and thus am able to recall at will all sorts of important memories in life. I'm keeping my important synapses strong.
There's another category besides super-agers: people with hyperthymesia: "a condition that leads people to be able to remember an abnormally large number of their life experiences in vivid detail. It is extraordinarily rare, with only about 60 people in the world having been diagnosed with the condition as of 2021." There's a documentary about these people. You ask them: what important event happened in your life on January 7th, 1980, and they can answer it accurately.
I haven't seen anything that indicates that is also true for episodic memory though.
For the "negative", I've mostly resorted to journaling in ways that help me self-discover and resolve the past, such as SelfAuthoring.com exercises that I continually write and re-write from time to time (I bought and copied the exercises to my local drive).
My wife tells me things we did, and there aren't photos of those occasions, so I know I'm not remembering everything.
The photo albums our parents and grandparents had were spaced repetition.
Not advertising it, but I've found it's the best for my needs despite the effort it takes to stick to it.
I would liken it to an average computer user making the effort to learn and stick to Emacs because they really believe it will pay off in the long term. And SuperMemo sure has paid off for me.
- optimism
- resilience
- perseverance
- active lifestyles
- engaged lifestyles
- having pursuits (like travel, reading, positive social relationships)
[1] https://www.sciencealert.com/less-than-5-superagers-what-the...
No, you can't use the phrase "leads to this". It misinforms the reader because that's not exactly what the researchers wrote. We need to be super pedantic about this because they found correlations of personality traits but did not make the leap to say optimism, etc were the causes. For your linked article:
>"The findings suggest that superagers have unique personality profiles," Rogalski said, noting that they stood out for their optimism, resilience, and perseverance – as well as active and engaged lifestyles, marked by pursuits like travel, reading, and positive social relationships.
There may be another hidden confounding variable that leads to both the optimism and the superager memory performance. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding)
E.g. the same researcher also wrote about rare Von Economo neurons (VENs)[1] that exist in higher quantities in the elderly that don't have early dementia and Alzheimers. They don't know if those rare VENs are present at birth. This means it could be an candidate confounding variable that causes both the optimism/resilience and protection from dementia.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5801202/
Sounds quite plausible to me that having a good memory at old age leads to a more active and engaged lifestyle leading to happy people that appear less neurotic and more extrovert.
Deleted Comment
Joking aside, having grown up relatively poor and feeling compelled to put work success above everything else to ensure economic stability for my kids these things really do negatively shape my expectations for the second half my life. Not sure what to do about that.
Biggest things you can do are the basics:
* Sleep as close to eight hours a night as you can
* Cook healthy food
* Maintain a low waist circumference and maintain muscle mass
* Have some combo of low intensity cardio (walking etc) and higher intensity stuff. A 7 min strength training circuit is good here
The basics are surprisingly hard, the majority of north american adults flunk all of these. From your description you may be missing at least the majority.
That’s ok, you have a clear priority in your life. The point is, examine that list and your own life/work schedule, and see if one of those can be improved within your existing framework.
Usually this is possible for one of them and they actually work together. Improving any of these gives your body its best shot at maintaining itself over the long haul despite work stress.
Maybe it’s the same with the brain.
Antidepressants to keep your brain young.
Laxatives to more easily get rid of your fast food dung.
β-Blockers for making sure your blood pressure isn't wrong.
And of course deodorant: fresh as a daisy, even without a shower because you were too lazy!
Pharmaceuticals, for when you just can't.
Even if I inherited this trait and lived that long, I doubt I would be able to repeat this - he's been very active throughout his whole life and neither drinks nor smokes.
> Superagers are more likely to be extroverts and less likely to be neurotic than others, and it looks like their active lifestyles aren't necessarily healthy in other ways. In at least one study, 71 percent of superagers smoked, while 83 percent drank alcohol regularly.
https://www.sciencealert.com/less-than-5-superagers-what-the...
Plus, the results are on a very small group. It's difficult for me to imagine that fMRI can reliably show differences. And it's also noticeable that they couch the effect in very vague terms: "similar pattern", "more youthful". That's a lot of freedom to interpret a few so much data.
That they've found a bio-marker sounds implausible to me: all they've found is a correlation with a memory task that can't be measured without applying that task.
Music seems to be another form of memory that resists memory loss even amongst Alzheimer patients.*
* https://www.dementiauk.org/music-therapy/
On the other hand i am quite good at relating bits of information, which is useful for problem solving, e.g. where was something similar seen before.
This relation ability also works for words, such as your use of "adept". That relates to Battle Chess and then another old game called "Archon II: Adept", which is a bit like chess.
Granted, it's not always useful things that come up this way.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archon_II:_Adept
Me and my partner just had a discussion this morning where she claimed I had met one of her friends, and her friends long term partner, in a bar. We apparently spent he whole evening together chatting. I remember nothing of this evening (and I wasn't drinking).
Dead Comment
I think it's a combination of a lack of stimuli, anxiety with work (I'm far from alone in our local employment where folks are underutilized and 'waiting to proceed', and a rut between the bed, the couch and the home office. I was (and am) getting exercise, but there needs to be more than that to continue to be mentally happy.
I think some of it was a psychological over-attribution to normal forgetfulness...people forget things...older people can proportionally forget more things...it's not [necessarily] early onset dementia, not during a pandemic.
But a small environment, with no long-term goals + the sheer terror of a pandemic and unstable government fed by the media machine...isn't healthy.